Page - 19 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

19 Introduction “When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.” —Fisher (2013, 53) “The best gift of all enlightenments is reasonable doubt. The best guarantee of all worldliness is attention to space and time.” —Spivak (2010, 35) Space over time. Foucault made it sound so simple when, in the “Des espaces autres” [“Of Other Spaces”] lecture he gave in March 1967 to a group of architects, he diagnosed the shift from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century as moving from a temporal focus on history to the epoch of space.1 Under- standing and theorizing the implications of this shift have prov- en a vexed affair, and just as geographers such as Nigel Thrift have long bemoaned that the discipline “neglected the time ho- rizon of its own concepts” (Thrift qtd. in Sharma 2014, 10), so too has the slow but accelerating cancellation of the future weighed 1 My thanks to Tyler Ball for reminding me of the relevance of the lecture’s context.